Twitter boots BitTorrent sites for 'abuse'

Twitter has suspended the accounts of two BitTorrent sites without prior notice and little explanation.

Both sites were regularly updating their Twitter accounts with links to freshly-posted torrents.

As reported by the Torrent Freak blog, Twitter has quashed the accounts of both YourBitTorrent and TorrentSurf for "abuse" of the micro-blogging service, but no additional explanation was given.

Twitter has yet to respond to a request for comment. But with the two BitTorrent sites regularly updating their accounts with torrent links, the assumption is that the Twitter powers-that-be suddenly decided they were in violation of house rules against micro-spam. "If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates," the terms say, then your account will be permanently suspended.

Rex Cruz, who runs YourBitTorrent, makes the same assumption. But he questions why other mainstream sites are allowed accounts under these rules. "I had over 80.000 tweets with basically a name of a file and a link to my site where they can find more info about it, and they just suspended the account for no reason," he tells us. "I read in the Terms of Use that you are not allowed to put mainly links, because that's considered as spam, but if you look at CNN or any other big twitter page, then you will notice that they do the same."

Cruz says his account had roughly 10,000 followers, and he claims that the list was deleted when Twitter suspended his account. TorrentSurf has not responded to a request for comment. But Torrent Freak reports that TorrentSurf's experience was similar to that of Your BitTorrent.

It seems, however, that the two suspensions are not part of a larger crackdown on torrent-related operations. As Torrent Freak points out, its own account is still active, as are the accounts of EZTV and isoHunt.

In February, Twitter claimed that an unnamed developer had installed a backdoor in a torrent system he sold to third-parties and used it to grab the log-in credentials of visitors. These credentials, Twitter said, were then used to break into Twitter and other popular sites.

The micro-blog outfit also sees the benefits of BitTorrent. The word is that it's using an open source BitTorrent client to help it distribute files across its backend servers. ®